The American Scene; Program of Klein and [Leon?] Stover

Good morning. This is Donald Smithburg for the Illinois Institute of Technology on the American Scene. This is a second in a series of programs which we're doing on space and the activities that are related to it. Most of us, I suppose, and many of the audience in an early morning show like this are children have a fascination with the idea of space. If there is old as I am, we can grow up on Edgar Wright's burrows and his novels on Mars. We've always been fascinated with space, but it's only been in a relatively short period of time that we've actually gotten to know anything about it. At Technology Center, we're setting up a program in which we call the Astro Science Center, which is a research and teaching program in this general field. Last week, we sort of generally surveyed some of the problems relating to space. This time, we want to get a little more specific. I have as my guest, Dr. Moore Klein, who is Assistant Director of Chemistry Research at the Armer

Research Foundation, which name will be changed of June 1st to the IIT Research Institute, and Mr. Cliff Stone of the Astro Science Center. Maybe we better go back a little bit from where we were last week because the audience varied somewhat. Clint, do you want to start out by saying or telling us what the Astro Science Center is? What are we studying? This is an organization and a group put together at the Armer Research Foundation in an effort to coordinate our activities in the space field. One of the features of space research is its many facets, its multidisciplinary approach, and in order to operate successfully, one needs to have information flowing both from other research centers and within a place as large as Armer Research Foundation, so that each group becomes aware of the problems and the advances of the other. It is a sizable project.

Yes, it is. It's a project of information flow. It's a project of organization. It's a project of actual research efforts and it covers all of these areas. Well, it's a fun work to you start out by saying what about the man's plans to get out into space? How far are we along? Where are we going? Can we go to Mars? Well, there's a wide variety of plans underway. I'm sure as many people know, from everything to landing a man on the moon, to landing instrument packages on Mars, we've recently had a program where we had a Venus flyby, we're planning project Apollo, which is going to orbit the moon, there are a great number of programs underway, and of course, we're at various stages of development along each program. I suppose this thing is going ahead, I had it a rather head -long clip because of our competition with the Soviets. Do we know very much about what the Soviets are doing? Are we working with them? How do

our teams coordinate it all? Well, I really don't think that we know what they're planning. This is the problem, of course. Most of their space stunts, and I use the stunt in a really respectful way, come as a surprise to us. Certainly, this last tandem flight with the two astronauts. We didn't know they were planning this whatsoever, and it was a remarkable achievement. And as I say, we're very respectful of it, and we are planning our own program, but we don't know that we're shooting in the same direction. They are, except for one thing. Are they have a vow their intent to land a man on a moon? Now, of course, this we know they're working toward, and this, of course, we're working toward. But in other areas, I don't think we can say. Well, suppose we get at some of the more technical problems, how do you get a person off the ground anyway? I believe the last program put a rather cute phrase on that. All that you have to do,

and this covers quite a great deal of ground. You have to have, of course, a large launch facility, such as Existed Cape Canaveral, suitable for the rocket itself, all of the support facilities, the countdown, the monitoring of the mission. You have to choose a booster in a vehicle. You have to design a mission, of course. You have to decide, really, at the beginning, before any of this, what it is you plan to accomplish, what its objectives are, in terms of both the point and space you wish to reach, and also the experiments and measurements that you want to make along the way, and when you reach your objective. So, there are many facets of this. More can perhaps tell us a little bit about the choice of rockets and boosters and the problems of the propulsion part of the vehicle. What kind of vehicles do you need in the first place? Maybe I can put it this way. I'm speaking seriously as a layperson. How

far have we gone since the Germans got the V2 in only 20 years ago? Well, this is a very complicated question. Let me answer your first question first, possibly, because this will kind of orient us, I think. You say, what do we want to do in space, and then the related problem is, what boosters do we need to do this? Well, when we started to ask these questions of ourselves, when we really got interested in space a few years ago, we discovered the answer was, we have no boosters to do this. Really, I mean, we had to go out and develop boosters. So, it's really a two -way street. In other words, we say, what do we want to do and what boosters do we need? But on the other hand, we say to ourselves, what boosters do we have and what can we do with them? You see, so our space program is really directed from two points of view in that way. Now, to answer your second question, right after the Second World War, naturally, the Russians started making the V2 larger and larger, and doing a great deal of research on developing larger engines based on pretty much the concepts which the Germans had

developed. On the other hand, rocket research lay fairly dormant in the United States for quite a few years, although we were developing bigger engines, but at quite a slow rate. Well, within the last few years, we have really accelerated our program, and of course, the development of the Atlas engines, which were used on all of our early space flights, and certainly were used on the last few, really showed that the Atlas engine could do the job, but it was a limited job. And so we've gone now into the development of still newer and more powerful engines. And those engines, I believe, that Lenn Reifel referred to the Centaur last week on the show, that's going to be the first liquid hydrogen -based engine. Liquid hydrogen is the most efficient of all the chemical fuels. And once that engine is developed, why we'll be able to do more things in space than we've ever been able to do before? How fast do you envisage this going on? Lenn, I think, in the last program, Dr. Reifel was saying that we had that man

might be on the moon by 1967. How fast is this going? This is one of the current objectives of the space program is to put a man on the moon in this decade. The program is proceeding very rapidly in many of the directions which are required. The support facilities for the man in the vehicle, the instrumentation, and, of course, on the rocket engines themselves, which are one of the very limiting features of the lunar mission, to say exactly when we're going to get there is almost an impossibility. Well, maybe I can phrase it another way. I'm going to ask you, born. To one extent, do we have available to us today a body of scientific, basic scientific information which is a requisite for such a venture or to what extent do we still have to develop the basic scientific concepts there? Well, I think to get a man on the moon, we have the scientific information. I think there's no question about that. Technology is lacking a little behind. We have to apply this scientific information to particular pieces of hardware

in order to accomplish this. Now, to achieve more ambitious space programs, the scientific information is lacking, and their upon is based our scientific program in space. In other words, to go out and get scientific information first, which we need for subsequent man flights. I think I can illustrate that point with one of the problems that comes with large boosters. When you reach these very large power levels, you create in the vehicle sonic environments that is high stress due to very large vibrations, large in the sense of amplitude. This has created a real problem in terms of designing instruments and components, which will withstand this. As we head towards the center, this problem is being enhanced, so that in terms of reliability of the mission, one has to solve this technological problem of the sonic environment, for example. Do you want to explain what the Cintar is, anywhere? Listen, I think, not know. What

is the Cintar project? Well, this is the name given to this rather large booster vehicle with the liquid hydrogen and oxygen as has been discussed. The exact numbers, I'm not sure I can quote, I think it's something like a million pounds of thrust, this general range. More, do you have a better figure than that one? Well, I think that's close enough. Actually, somewhat before the Cintar is the Saturn program, which is under development. Now, the Saturn is really nothing more than a combination of eight engines that we currently have available. If you take eight Atlas engines with about 150 ,000 pounds of thrust, you'll see rapidly you're up over a million pounds of thrust. So Saturn is first, it's going to cluster eight of these existing Atlas engines. Now, we're developing Cintar, which is an engine, really, based on liquid hydrogen and oxygen. What you'll see the next logical step is to cluster this better engine, you'll see, onward and upward. I think one thing that should be pointed out, we spend an awful lot of time talking about engines and fuel, and not many people really,

really realize how important this is. That is, when you start to think about landing a man or instruments or anything, someplace out in space. The payload, the thing you're going to take there, represents really a very small portion of what you lift off the ground. And when you stop to realize that at lift off in a big missile, the missile is maybe from 90 to 95 percent fuel by weight. You see that it is much more important to have a very efficient fuel. Let's say then it is to have a very small package transistor or something in the payload, you see, because really all the fuel gets lifted off at the beginning, too. This is why it's so important to have powerful fuel. Well, what kind of a vehicle did they use on the mariners? They sent it all the way to Venus. How was that? I had to send it away, anyway. Well, that was launched on an Atlas missile, and there were several stages, of course, and staging is a trick that you use, of course, to get around less powerful boosters, because you get all

of the mission hardware off the ground. And then, of course, after a little while, you cast away the first stage, so you don't have to take this on a longer trip, you see, and you're reducing your weight all the way. And with the use of adequate staging, while you can get pretty far with the boosters that we have, but staging, of course, introduces a variable that we don't like to play with. All the stages have to fire in the right sequence and so forth. So for very costly, important manned missions, you try to get away from staging with more powerful engines. I would like to ask you what we want to reserve, one of these programs to talk about the cost of this thing, but one of some of the more technical problems in tracking these vehicles and bringing them back, and that sort of thing. Well, when you realize the distance from here to Mars, for example, and the fact that you would like to someday land on Mars, and preferably at a predetermined spot, the amount of error in terms of

percentages, for example, the usual sort of numbers we're familiar with, is rather fabulous, that the angular deviation or the variation in the course over this long journey that can be tolerated is very, very small. And the method by which this course is achieved, of course, is the tracking of the vehicle throughout its trajectory, applying small corrective measures from auxiliary engines, which is an area we haven't talked about, but is also an important development metal area. And in order to do this, you require tracking facilities of very high degree of accuracy, reliability, and you also, of course, have the position problem in that the earth is rotating with respect to the orbit all of the time, and require therefore tracking station situated throughout the entire world. When we sent out a month or so ago, we sent out some kind of communications satellite, then we lost it up there someplace, and nobody knows if you know where it is. This is

one of the problems that you encounter. I've talked recently to some of the people directly involved in their current feeling, which is at best a guess at the moment since they haven't really located the vehicle, is that in the second portion of the orbit, as you may remember, this went into a parking orbit, and then was supposed to be re -injected into its final orbit, and they feel that some of the engine components of misoperated at that point, and that the direction in which it went and the orbit which it finally achieved was just radically different from the one which they had anticipated. Well, we couldn't have done any of this work in space, could we, without the invention of the computer? No, that's right. Incidentally, Clint mentioned the point there which I think ought to be stressed, and that is once we get off the ground, so to speak, and up in space, and we're looking for another orbit to go into, whether it's an orbit around the Earth or whether it's an orbit around Mars, we have to have a mechanism

for getting into orbit, and also on the way there we have to have a mechanism for changing our course. And the particular vehicles that we use and that we're going to be using, the way we do this is with small auxiliary rocket engines on the side, which we call Vernier rockets, which basically just fire an engine, let's say in an off -center sort of way, to re -correct the course. In other words, instead of straight ahead, maybe a little to one side or another. So there's a lot of smaller engines on this vehicle, and they have to, of course, all be fired on command from the ground to adjust the direction in just the right way. So you have to track it, you have to know where it's at, you have to know where you want to be, and you have to make the correction out in space very accurately. I'd like to comment on your computer question, if I might. Computers are at once the salvation and the bane of the space program. You're quite right that the miracles, and I think in terms of the timescale in which they've been accomplished, one can truly say the are miracles, that have been accomplished, are due in many, in great measure, to the

computers that are available. Both in terms of tracking, programming, so on. However, this is also an important step in the data acquisition phase. All of the information from the computer, or from the satellite, excuse me, is returned and fed into computers for preliminary processing, and we are accumulating literally miles and miles of tape, which needs processing, and this is becoming a real serious backlog from the scientific viewpoint, in that many, many of the results, both expected and unexpected, are not being achieved rapidly by virtue of this bottleneck. With this, because of the lack of availability of trained manpower, Yes, that's one of the important features, of course. Computers do part of the job, but you must still tell them what to do, and when the data is printed out in its final form, you must also make sense out of it, and here you cannot replace the scientist, and very recently, as a matter

of fact, NASA has made a plea for people to work in this area, and I think feel that they need hundreds, literally thousands of people to be involved in the data handling field. Speaking of computers, I might just mention that all of this gear that we have on the satellite, or on the exploration vehicle that's out in space, all requires electrical power, and this is a kind of a more subtle thing that not many people worry about, but it's a very important part of our total space program. There's no 110 volt receptacles on the moon, nor on any of these particular vehicles that we shoot out. There is a tremendous need for power up there to operate all of the communication systems that we send out, as well as to take the signals from the ground and convert them to other mechanical actions aboard the satellite. Well, there we depend on solar energy, don't we, or how do we do it? Well, actually up until now, we've dependent on two things for auxiliary power. One is

we take some power off of these small rocket motors. In other words, we let the gases before they escape from the rocket motors go through small turbines and turn them and create some power on the particular aerospace vehicle. But of course, you're limited here to firing your motors for other reasons. So the main real source has been solar power. Now, you remember that one of the things that happened on Telstar, for example, was they lost their power due to one reason or another, their solar cells weren't working properly, and they got them back working properly from the ground. But remember that solar power, of course, depends on sunlight, and when you're out in space, you're not always in the sunlight. You might be in darkness, you might be behind some other planet. So we have batteries on board also for power. We have batteries for storage, let's say, that take off the solar power, or maybe you'll get too much in a day time, and you store it up for nighttime use. And all of these things weigh a tremendous amount. And one of the big research areas that we're looking into now are lighter means of getting electrical power up in space. Well, that brings up another question. Of course, the whole space effort would not have been possible without the development

of metals, which can stand a high heat. And what metals do we use? What are these things made of anyway? Well, there's a whole new class of esoteric metals and materials, really. I think, in many cases, they're combinations of ceramics and metals, alloys, and so on, titanium, beryllium, many metals that were curiosity items years ago, or five or ten years ago, really, are now standard on our space missions. There are serious problems yet to be solved in this area. If you take, for example, a mission landing on Mars, one has to enter either the prime vehicle or a small lander capsule, depending upon the design of the mission, through the atmosphere of Mars. There are reasons to believe that the atmosphere of Mars is rather vial and chemically speaking, and that when a high speed object enters, the surface of the vehicle will be subject to both high

thermal stress and high mechanical chemical stress. So there is a serious concern now, being reflected in research about materials for that kind of mission. It seems to be that the program is going ahead so fast. It seems to be, it involves a fantastically complex combination of skills, doesn't it? Yes, let me make it worse and talk about temperature control a little bit, as we were talking about materials. As we're riding through space, of course, we want to make sure that the temperature on the vehicle is correct for either inhabitants or instruments or what have you aboard. You just can't allow it to get hot and cold like it would be during the normal light and dark periods in space, and so a great deal of research is being directed along another activity, which we call space coatings, where we're concerned very much with the paint that we put on the outside of this vehicle. It has to have the right absorptivity to absorb sunlight and the right emissivity to get rid of the heat that the sunlight would create normally

inside of the particular vehicle. How do we do that? Is there special kinds of paints that have been developed or have been and we're working all the time to try and improve them? Well, what about the things that we might run into out there like micromediorts and asteroids and some of the things that John Glenn claimed to tell us is window? Well, more and more information is being accumulated on those particular hazards or perhaps not hazards. As the non -man missions go ahead, I think it's fairly clear now that there is a belt of micromediorites and asteroids fairly close to Earth, but that once you get beyond this position that this kind of particle diminishes rather rapidly, although there was one mysterious bump on the last mariner mission, which is still as far as I know, I want to explain, but that is one thing that has to be taken into account in the design of the vehicle. There's protection against such a

particle or clump of matter, because even though the odds of hitting one are relatively small for an expensive operation like this and for, of course, manned operations, you just cannot take a chance on even small probabilities. Has anybody ever figured out what John Glenn said? There have been discussions of that ranging all the way from paint flaking off the vehicle itself to possibly interactions of the weight of the vehicle with the residual atmosphere. I have not heard a final definitive answer in this area. One thing that interested me on the blast program we had with Mr. Tarrell was seeing that the radiation belts, the Van Allen belts aren't as much of a hazard as we had thought. Are my correct in interpreting that? That's true. They're a fairly well -mapped, the intensity of particle, the kind of particle there, their position in space is fairly well -known, and they're reasonably well confined, so that you can postulate for most missions going out through the radiation belt without

any undue difficulty. This is missions which go well beyond the Earth's atmosphere as it's called. If you're talking about close -in orbiting missions, that's another problem again. The thing that is of current concern, of course, are solar flares, which do at times produce rather large quantities of low and high energy, nuclear radiation, if you will, and they're unpredictable both in time and the extent of their radiation. So people are both looking for methods of predicting solar flares to take emergency measures while in route, and also for design techniques to protect against the radiation. I think that the youngsters watching this program listening to it would be interested in knowing whether or not there is a possibility of there actually participating in missions to distant planets, or is it just still in the realm of the science

fiction or how? Have we got any way of knowing when we get the technical capabilities? Let's say sending a man to Mars. How long would it take to get a man to Mars when our president's system of propulsion? Forever. We don't really have the system of propulsion developed yet, although there's a couple of things on the way that might make sense within the next 20 to 50 years, let's say. We're working very hard on nuclear rocket engines. You see, once you get off the ground, the most important thing is not so much to have a lot of thrust as it is to have a continuing supply of low -level thrust for the rest of the mission, because then you don't really need lift. You need continued acceleration. Some small amount of thrust. The nuclear engine looks good for second and third stages, and another thing that's getting a lot of look into today is what we call an ion engine. Well, an ion is merely a charged particle, something like you might get

jumping off your hand when you create static electricity, something that's got a plus or a minus electrical charge on it, like an electron that flows along a wire for electricity. If you can take these charged particles and accelerate them much faster than we normally do here on the ground and get them going very fast, then as they leave the space vehicle, this would impart a thrust to the vehicle just as the propellants leaving in part a thrust. Very low thrust, but a very lightweight continuing thrust. If these kinds of things can be developed, we can think in terms of real long -range wires. I believe that John, that Glenn and the other astronauts who travel at about 17 ,000 miles an hour isn't that about the speed they travel. How fast is it possible to get these things going? What kind of a technical problem do you run into? Could we ever hope to get up towards the speed of light? Well, this is a tremendous technical problem. Of course, as Dr. Rifle mentioned last week, it depends on how much energy you have to expend to get up there, and pretty soon you reach the point of diminishing returns. Are we expanding more energy to

get at some level than we'll ever get out of it in terms of other returns? Yes, it's a terrific problem, I suppose, but we're still in, we're moving so terribly fast that I wonder if any organization, including ours, our extras, Science Center can coordinate this material. What do you think, Clint? Problems are solved pieces at a time. You don't suddenly break the whole barrier, and I think in that sense, organizations like ARF and many others in the country are solving these one by one, and it's fitting into an overall picture, which I think points to men, missions, to our near -planet neighbors at least. Well, I have to interrupt and bring the program to a close. I want to thank the gentleman for coming in, and I'd like to say again that this is the second program in a series that we're having on space, and we'll be continuing to discuss this matter further next week. Thank you very much.